The Case Against The National Weather Service

With Hurricane Isaac about to hit the Gulf of Mexico I was doing some research and realized like with many government bureaucracies how inefficient the government run weather service is. When I was younger I use to be into meteorology because he dealt with a lot of math and science (which I was pretty good at). Back in the 1990’s I use to have a hurricane tracker in my room where you could track a hurricane using magnetic dots which seemed pretty cool at the time. These days everything can be easily seen on the computer and in real time.

What opened my eyes about the National Weather Service was this article. The article makes pretty good arguments for why we shouldn’t have the National Weather Service. The service relied on bad information which led to the death of 22 people in Nashville because of major flooding. Even when Hurricane Katrina hit the National Weather Service was half a day behind the for profit service (AccuWeather). What is interesting is that the National Weather Service provides updates a few times a day while AccuWeather has hour by hour updates.  Not only is the National Weather Service behind they also have an error rate that is 20% greater than the greedy for-profit companies. The National Weather Service also did the worst when compared to other sources of weather information.

According to this report from the NOAA the National Weather Service is asking for $5.1 billion for 2013 which is a $154 million increase from 2012. Good grief with $5.1 billion you would think that the National Weather Service was somehow improving the weather. If I were in Congress I would propose a budget amendment. The budget amendment would read that for every year that the National Weather Service did worse than for-profit weather service companies the National Weather Service budget would be cut 20%.

What is really interesting is why we need more money for the National Weather Service when we live in a generation where Twitter, Facebook, and cell phones are probably the most effective and quickest forms of communication for severe weather.  George Mason University economics professor Dr. Don Boudreaux as usually writes elegantly in the WSJ last year that weather related fatalities have drastically decreased over the past 70 years.  Dr. Boudreaux even gets serious by betting anyone $10,000 that the average number of Americans killed by tornadoes, floods, and hurricanes will continue to fall over the next 20 years.  I have always said that betting limits ignorance.

The National Weather Service is not needed when we have so many private companies that already do the exact same thing with not only better information but don’t use taxpayer money. The technology will continue to improve and the warning systems will also continue to improve which will save lives. Free markets can not only make products at higher quality with lower prices but in the case of the weather service actually save lives, provide better information, while not using taxpayer money. Too bad the forecast for the National Weather Service looks sunny with high government funding and a low of taxpayer satisfaction.